I get the feeling Dan Bice likes the spotlight. It's heady stuff. In the past two days, he's made TV appearances, given radio interveiws, received lots of reaction and feedback from the public.
It seems he enjoys being a star reporter, sort of like a composite of Woodward and Bernstein.
Naturally, Bice continues to milk the story he chose to spill, the affair between Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn and Jessica McBride.
Writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Bice addresses the statement that McBride issued on Friday. In the process, he takes some very cheap shots at McBride.
Bice clings to his discussion about ethics and objectivity in journalism at the same time that he's making his differences with McBride very personal.
Local journalist Jessica McBride confirmed Friday that she had an affair earlier this year with Police Chief Edward A. Flynn, someone about whom she had written a glowing profile for Milwaukee Magazine.
Flynn has acknowledged the indiscretion and has asked the city to forgive him. News of the affair blew through City Hall and the Milwaukee Police Department while dominating talk radio Friday.
For better than two weeks, McBride declined to answer a series of phone calls, e-mails and other inquiries. But on the day No Quarter disclosed the relationship and Flynn's apology, McBride issued a statement trying to explain her actions.
"The romantic relationship with Chief Flynn began in May at Brocach's Irish Pub - four months after I completed and turned in the Milwaukee Magazine article," she wrote.
That's, in short, what she put out there.
Even more interesting is what she left out.
Her statement fails to address details from a letter that she wrote to Flynn last month. In that note, the 39-year-old journalist describes how it was love at first sight during her first interview with the 61-year-old top cop. She also suggests that her feelings and attitude toward the chief affected her handling of the story.
It's really a stretch for Bice to be basing his case against McBride on her alleged declaration of "love at first sight."
A statement like that made in retrospect doesn't prove anything.
Speaking of love at first sight, I wonder what Bice thinks of the ethics of members of the national and local media and the way they cover Obama. We know when it comes to Obama, it was love at first sight for many of them, and they make no apologies about it. In the case of their coverage of Obama, we're talking about the media playing a crucial role in influencing the public's view of life-altering policy matters and critical information to the country's future. Although Obama's plans should be relayed truthfully to the public in a balanced and unbiased manner, that, of course, is not happening. No problem with that.
But in the case of McBride's Milwaukee Magazine profile on Flynn, we're supposed to accept the premise that the article had a tremendous impact on the city, that it was such a powerful piece that it significantly affected the public. I think that's overstating it more than a bit. The notion that "love at first sight" forces being part of that article worked to alter and undermine the course of events in the city is ludicrous.
I don't get why Bice is determined to destroy McBride's reputation as a journalist. He is bent on slamming her for violating journalistic ethics, even though she clarifies that she wrote the article before she became personally involved with Flynn.
He seems to dismiss the e-mail from Ed Flynn that she included with her statement, an e-mail that's important to the time line of events in the matter.
Sure, Bice acknowledges its existence but he chooses not to give it the significance it deserves. He tucks two sentences about that e-mail in his column and never discusses how it throws off the theory about the start of the relationship between Flynn and McBride that he has pieced together.
...On Friday, McBride released an e-mail from Flynn from late April in which he praised her magazine story, titled "The Cop Who Can't Stop," and invited her out for coffee, presumably at the Irish tavern. She said she turned in the story in January and that it hit the newsstands in mid-April.
"At the time of the Brocach's meeting in May," her statement says, "I was an academic who no longer covered Flynn and would not ever do so again."
Instead of admitting that the e-mail calls into doubt his assertions that McBride played the part of an unethical journalist in this drama, he simply tosses the information aside and goes on the attack.
It's odd to me that McBride's Milwaukee Magazine article has taken on such importance. I wasn't aware of it until Thursday night. Was it really so influential that it should receive all this focus? Was it influential at all? I think the power of the profile is being greatly overestimated by Bice. All this ethical scrutiny over a profile piece in Milwaukee Magazine? That seems a bit much.
Apparently, Bice doesn't like McBride's attitude.
...Unlike Flynn, she offered no apologies for the liaison, though she said she has "addressed the relationship with those who need to know the details." She is married to former Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher, an unsuccessful candidate for attorney general in 2006.
Overall, the tone of Flynn's statement was contrite, whereas McBride's was combative.
The stakes for her, though, are pretty high.
McBride, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has taught ethics as part of her journalism classes. Reporters are forbidden from writing about individuals to whom they have strong personal ties.
In the next year or two, McBride will be up for "indefinite status," which is similar to tenure for academic staff members. Officials in the journalism department have declined to comment so far on the matter.
In Bice's view, McBride doesn't show the proper contriteness. So Bice deems her to be "combative."
I don't think it's fair for Bice to complain that McBride is combative just because she's trying to set the record straight and defend herself against his accusations.
Bice suggests that McBride is lying because her career in UWM's journalism department is on the line. In effect, he says that she can't afford to be contrite, like Flynn, because the stakes for her are "pretty high."
That's lame. He's concocting a motivation for her to allegedly mischaracterize events.
Bice concedes that the stakes are high for Flynn, too. "[I]t's not as if Flynn is out of the woods," he writes.
No kidding.
Bice doesn't address the fact that the stakes are high for the city of Milwaukee. He doesn't point out Flynn's successes and the progress he's made in the city.
I don't know if Bice realizes that being responsible for hyping a campaign to run Flynn out of town and ruin McBride professionally would not be a proud legacy.
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UPDATE, June 22, 2009: The McBride Affair
And how the Journal Sentinel got it dead wrong.
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UPDATE, June 27, 2009: Murphy, McBride, and Bice
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